Spring Cannot be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy

‘We have lost touch with nature, rather foolishly as we are a part of it, not outside it. This will in time be over and then what? What have we learned?… The only real things in life are food and love, in that order, just like [for] our little dog Ruby… and the source of art is love. I love life.’

DAVID HOCKNEY

Praise for David Hockney and Martin Gayford’s previous book, A History of Pictures:

‘I won’t read a more interesting book all year … utterly fascinating’ AN Wilson, Sunday Times

‘A magic flight of a book… It’s a measure of Hockney’s vividness of perception that he can always put a cap on Gayford’s knowledge … fabulous’ Clive James, Guardian

‘Elegant and often surprising… Hockney flags up a topic and Gayford gives the critical armature: it makes for a refreshing double act’ Michael Prodger’s Books of the Year, Sunday Times

‘An eloquent conversational testimony to the vividness of life lived through intelligent looking. You will see Caravaggio and Citizen Kane with fresh eyes’ Daily Telegraph

‘[Hockney] asks big questions about the nature of picture-making and the relationship between painters and photography in a way that no other contemporary artist seems to do … enormously good-humoured and entertaining … On almost every page, there is an interesting provocation’ Andrew Marr, New Statesman

On turning eighty, David Hockney sought out rustic tranquillity for the first time: a place to watch the sunset and the change of the seasons; a place to keep the madness of the world at bay. So when Covid-19 and lockdown struck, it made little difference to life at La Grande Cour, the centuries-old Normandy farmhouse where Hockney set up a studio a year before, in time to paint the arrival of spring. In fact, he relished the enforced isolation as an opportunity for even greater devotion to his art.

Spring Cannot be Cancelled is an uplifting manifesto that affirms art’s capacity to divert and inspire. It is based on a wealth of new conversations and correspondence between Hockney and the art critic Martin Gayford, his long-time friend and collaborator. Their exchanges are illustrated by a selection of Hockney’s new, unpublished Normandy iPad drawings and paintings alongside works by van Gogh, Monet, Bruegel, and others.

We see how Hockney is propelled ever forward by his infectious enthusiasms and sense of wonder. A lifelong contrarian, he has been in the public eye for sixty years, yet remains entirely unconcerned by the view of critics or even history. He is utterly absorbed by his four acres of northern France and by the themes that have fascinated him for decades: light, colour, space, perception, water, trees. He has much to teach us, not only about how to see… but about how to live.